By Audrey Leon, Lauren B. Howard and Ambar Gilmore

Maribel Lopez Velazquez starts every day at 6 a.m. enthusiastically greeting busy parents and sleepy children from the top of her front porch at her Cicero home day care center.

Lopez Velazquez, 37, a single mother of four teenage children, lights up with joy whenever she talks about her students that range from infants to 12-years-old.

“Loving children is not the ingredient you need to open up your child care,” Lopez Velazquez said. “The ingredient you need is dedication, perseverance, you want to do something for yourself.”

Lopez Velazquez founded Bundle of Joy Group Child Care, 1626 S. 57th Ave., after attending the Women’s Business Development Center (WBDC) child care expo in 1998.

The center, at 8 S. Michigan Ave., provides assistance to those women who want to start a new business or those who already have.

Lopez Velazquez is one of 55,000 women that the center has helped in its 25 years in business. It has established 14 women’s assistance centers in six states including Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

In 1986, Hedy Ratner and Carol Dougal created the Women’s Business Development Center, a non-profit organization, to empower women by encouraging them to go into business for themselves.

“[The center] was really a critically interesting new way to economically empower women through business ownership,” said Ratner, co-president and founder of the center. “Because we felt that women needed to find their own way and their own power so they wouldn’t be dependent on others. Like white males.”

The Women’s Business Development Center holds an annual child care expo with workshops for Spanish- and English-speaking entrepreneurs looking to start their own day care business.

“I saw all these conferences coming up and all these workshops and I enrolled,” Lopez Velazquez said of the development center. “I took an active role to get more information.”

Ratner sees the expo as an important resource for those wanting to go into the child care field.

“The childcare expo was a way for us to bring together those who were thinking about going into the childcare business who were family providers of childcare or those who were establishing childcare centers or had childcare centers,” she said. “(We) provide them with information on trends; new resources they could use to be more successful.”

Maria Lopez, director of the Latina Business Program at the center for the last three years, points out that opening a daycare center is often overlooked.

“[The child care expo] is for the women who are already running a business and never really looked at it that way,” Maria Lopez said. “This was an opportunity for them to learn about the business aspect of taking care of children, teaching children, educating them.

“It came up because there was a need in the community, across communities,” she said.

With urging from her mother to start her own business, Lopez Velazquez began marketing her business idea to her community to drum up support.

“I started promoting in the neighborhood,” Lopez Velazquez said. “I started a child care waiting list. By the time I started my day care I had 25 kids enlist.”

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